2013 Financial Markets ConferenceSpeaker Biographies

David E. Altig is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His responsibilities include advising the Bank president on monetary policy and related matters, overseeing the Bank's research department and regional executives, and sitting on the Bank's management and discount committees. Altig also serves as an adjunct professor of economics in the graduate school of business at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which he joined in 1991 as an economist. Prior to joining the Cleveland Fed, Altig was a faculty member in the department of business economics and public policy at Indiana University. His research focuses primarily on monetary and fiscal policy and has been published in such journals as the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; the American Economic Review; and the Journal of Monetary Economics. Altig received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Iowa and a master's degree and a doctorate in economics from Brown University.

Ben S. Bernanke began a second term as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 1, 2010. He also serves as chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. Before being appointed chairman in 2006, Bernanke was chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Previously, he held several roles in the Federal Reserve System: as a member of the Board of Governors; a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York; and a member of the New York Fed's academic advisory panel. Bernanke's academic career included teaching positions at Princeton University, Stanford University, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as the director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and was a member of its business-cycle dating committee. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University and a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Willem Buiter has been chief economist at Citigroup since 2010. A distinguished macroeconomist whose work has been widely published, Buiter previously was a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics (LSE). From 2005 to 2010, he was an adviser to Goldman Sachs, advising clients on a global basis. Prior to this, he was chief economist for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and a founder external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. Buiter has been a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the European Commission, as well as an adviser to many central banks and finance ministries. He has held a number of leading academic positions at LSE, Yale University, and Cambridge University. Buiter has a BA in economics from Cambridge and a PhD in economics from Yale. He has been a member of the British Academy since 1998 and was awarded the CBE in 2000 for services to economics.

Charles Calomiris is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and a professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. He is a member of the Shadow Open Market Committee, the Financial Economists Roundtable, and the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board. Calomiris is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research spans several areas, including banking, corporate finance, financial history, and monetary economics. He received a BA in economics from Yale University and a PhD in economics from Stanford University.

Gerard Caprio Jr. is the William Brough Professor of Economics at Williams College and chair of its Center for Development Economics. Previously, he was the director for policy in the World Bank's financial sector vice presidency and head of financial sector research. At the World Bank, Caprio assembled a first-rate research team and worked in 30 countries in 18 years. His research included establishing the first databases on banking crises around the world and on bank regulation and supervision, and he has written widely on crises and regulatory issues. He was previously vice president and head of global economics at JP Morgan, and an economist at the Federal Reserve Board and the International Monetary Fund. Caprio has taught at Trinity College Dublin, where he was a Fulbright scholar, and at George Washington University. He has authored numerous articles, and his latest book is Guardians of Finance: Making Regulators Work for Us (with Jim Barth and Ross Levine, 2012). He is a coeditor of the Journal of Financial Stability and editor-in-chief of a three-volume handbook series on financial globalization for Elsevier (2012).

Jean-Edouard Colliard is an economist in the Financial Research Division of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. His main research interests include the economics of banking and financial markets microstructure. He has worked in particular on the regulation of banks in the Basel framework and on the impact of trading fees on limit order markets. He published a paper in the Review of Financial Studies last year. Colliard graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and obtained a PhD in 2012 from the Paris School of Economics.

Ron Feldman is the senior vice president for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis's supervision, regulation, and credit division. He joined the Bank in 1995 as a senior financial specialist in the supervision department. He assumed supervisory responsibilities shortly thereafter and was promoted to assistant vice president in 1999 and vice president in 2004. Feldman ran the Financial Services Support Office in 2004. Since that time, he has served as vice president in supervision, regulation, and credit with responsibilities for payments system risk/credit/reserves, applications/surveillance, quality assurance, and supervision of U.S. Bancorp. He has contributed to the analysis of a wide variety of banking and regulatory policy issues at the Bank and System level. Feldman is the coauthor of the book Too Big to Fail: The Hazards of Bank Bailouts (with Gary Stern, 2004). He has a BA from the University of Wisconsin and an MPA from Syracuse University. Claudio Franzetti is acting CEO and chief risk officer of Swiss Export Risk Insurance in Zurich. Prior to that he held senior positions with Aon Resolution AG, was the head of group credit portfolio management and managing director of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, the head of risk management and controlling of Swiss Re's investment division, and senior consultant with IRIS AG in Zurich. Before entering the finance industry he started as a research engineer with Asea Brown Boveri, in Baden, in the field of computational fluid dynamics. Franzetti received a master's degree in economics from the University of St. Gall and a master's in mechanical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Kristopher S. Gerardi is a financial economist and associate policy adviser in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His major fields of study are real estate economics, applied microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Prior to joining the Bank in 2008, Gerardi was a research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He also worked as a teaching assistant at Boston University and a research assistant at Hamilton College. Gerardi has published in several journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Political Economy, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Journal of Urban Economics, and the Journal of Housing Economics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics and has served as a referee for the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Review of Industrial Organization. He received a bachelor's degree in economics and physics from Hamilton College and a PhD in economics from Boston University.

Andrew Haldane is executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England. He has responsibility for developing bank policy on financial stability issues and the management of the financial stability area. Haldane is a member of the Financial Policy Committee as well as several other senior international committees. Haldane has written extensively on domestic and international monetary and financial stability. He is the cofounder of Pro Bono Economics, which aims to broker economists into projects in the charitable sector.

Matthew Kabaker joined Centerbridge Partners in 2011 as senior managing director and focuses on investments in financial services, institutions, and assets in the United States and Europe. Prior to joining Centerbridge, he was a senior adviser to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the deputy assistant secretary for capital markets in the Treasury Department. In addition to establishing Treasury's Office of Capital Markets, Kabaker was active in efforts to design the policy response to the financial crisis, design and implement the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and address housing finance reform, including government-sponsored entities. He also served on Treasury's Financial Stability Policy Council and Housing Policy Council. Before joining the Treasury Department in 2008, Kabaker was a managing director at Blackstone and worked in the firm's private equity business in New York and London for more than 10 years. While at Blackstone, he focused on investments in the financial services and retail sectors. Kabaker earned a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated summa cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He serves on the board of directors of Aktua Soluciones Financieras, S.L. and Santander Consumer USA Inc.

Narayana Kocherlakota is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. In that capacity, Kocherlakota serves on the Federal Open Market Committee, the policymaking arm of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to his responsibilities as a monetary policymaker, Kocherlakota oversees all operations of the bank, including supervision and regulation, and payments services. Before his appointment as president, Kocherlakota served as a member of the Minneapolis Fed's research staff, as well as a research consultant for the Bank. His prior experience also includes professorships at the University of Minnesota, where he was chair of the economics department, and at Stanford University. Kocherlakota has published more than 30 articles in academic journals on a variety of topics, including monetary and financial economics. His work includes theoretical and empirical contributions to monetary economics and financial economics. He earned an AB in mathematics from Princeton University and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

Jason Kravitt is a partner at Mayer Brown LLP and the founder of the firm's securitization practice. He served as cochair of the firm from 1998-2001 and is a cofounder of the American Securitization Forum, the industry's preeminent trade association. Kravitt helps to lead large securitization transactions and large residential mortgage-backed securities settlements such as the recent Bank of America/Bank of New York Mellon $8.5 billion settlement. He is listed as the “preeminent securitization lawyer” by Chambers Global. He is also an adjunct professor of law at Northwestern University Law School and New York University Law School. In 2010, Kravitt was named one of the 10 most innovative lawyers in America by the Financial Times and was chosen the “best lawyer in securitization in New York City” by “Best Lawyers 2012 Lawyers of the Year.” He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Johns Hopkins University and received a JD degree cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Dennis P. Lockhart is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In this role he is responsible for all of the Bank's activities, including monetary policy, bank supervision and regulation, and payment services. He also chairs the Bank's management committee. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed in March 2007, Lockhart served on the faculty of Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching in the master's program and chairing the program's concentrations in international business-government relations and global commerce and finance. He was also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to his academic career Lockhart was managing partner at the private equity firm Zephyr Management LP. He also worked at Heller Financial, where he served as executive vice president and director of the parent company and as president of Heller International Group. Previously, Lockhart held various positions, both domestic and international, with Citicorp/Citibank. In addition to his professional activities, Lockhart was a member of the boards of directors of several companies and was chairman of the Small Enterprise Assistance Funds, a not-for-profit operator of emerging markets venture capital funds. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science and economics from Stanford University and a master's degree in international economics and American foreign policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Eugene A. Ludwig is the founder and chief executive officer of Promontory Financial Group. Since he founded the firm in 2001, more than half the world's largest banks and eight of the 10 largest financial institutions have turned to Promontory for strategic and/or risk control guidance. Previously, Ludwig was vice chairman of Bankers Trust Company, where he was responsible for risk controls and strategic planning, and ultimately for engineering Bankers Trust's sale to Deutsche Bank. From 1993 to 1998, Ludwig headed the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency responsible for supervising federally chartered commercial banks and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. As comptroller, he spearheaded efforts to modernize the banking industry and reform the Community Reinvestment Act. Ludwig has also served as the chairman of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, member of the Basel Committee on International Bank Supervision, director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and chairman of the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation. He graduated from Yale University with a JD, received a master's degree as a Keasbey Fellow from Oxford University, and graduated magna cum laude from Haverford College.

Arthur J. Murton is the director of the division of insurance and research at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The division is responsible for macro risk analysis, banking statistics, deposit insurance pricing and insurance funds management, and policy development and banking research, both in-house and through the FDIC's Center for Financial Research. He received a BA in economics from Duke University and a PhD in economics from the University of Virginia.

Craig Pirrong is a professor of finance and the director of the Global Energy Management Institute at Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. He joined the Bauer College faculty after teaching at the University of Michigan School of Business Administration, the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, and Oklahoma State University. He worked in private industry for Lexecon Inc. and GNP Commodities, and has also done consulting for OM, Warenterminbörse, Deutsche Terminbörse, Eurex, the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Stock Exchange, several electric utilities, and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. His research focuses on the economics of derivatives markets and risk management. Pirrong has a PhD, an MBA, and a BA from the University of Chicago.

David Rowe is founder and president of David M. Rowe Risk Advisory, a risk management consulting firm. The firm focuses on risk management support for boards and senior executives of financial institutions—primarily banks and investment banks—with particular emphasis on capital market activities. It also advises on risk management technology strategy and vendor relationships. Previously, Rowe was executive vice president for risk management at SunGard, and also spent more than 25 years in the banking and economic forecasting industries, including serving as senior vice president of the risk management information group at Bank of America in San Francisco. He earned a BA in economics from Carleton College, an MBA in finance with a concentration in money and banking from the Wharton Graduate School of Finance and Commerce, and a PhD in econometrics and finance from the University of Pennsylvania.

Til Schuermann is a partner in the finance and risk and public policy practices division at Oliver Wyman, where he works with a number of domestic and international financial institutions on stress testing and capital planning. From May to September 2012, his team conducted stress testing of the Spanish banking system for the government of Spain. Prior to joining Oliver Wyman, Schuermann was a senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he held numerous positions, including head of financial intermediation in the research department and head of credit risk in bank supervision. Widely published in his field, Schuermann is an associate editor at the Journal of Financial Services Research and the Journal of Risk. He is a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Financial Institution Center, where he also teaches. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Courant Institute's Mathematics in Finance program at New York University, has taught at Columbia University, and serves as a member of Global Association of Risk Professionals' financial risk management committee. Schuermann earned a BA in economics from the University of California–Berkeley and a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kenneth E. Scott is the Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business Emeritus at Stanford University and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research focuses on legislative and policy developments related to the financial crisis, comparative corporate governance, and bank regulation. Scott has extensive government consulting experience, including for the World Bank, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Resolution Trust Corporation, and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. He is also a member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, Financial Economists Roundtable, and the California State Bar's Financial Institutions Committee. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1968, he was general counsel to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and worked in private practice in New York with Sullivan & Cromwell. His most recent books are Bankruptcy Not Bailout (2012),coedited with John B. Taylor, and Ending Government Bailouts (2010), coedited with George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor. Scott earned a BA from the College of William and Mary, an MA from Princeton University, and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Erik R. Sirri is a professor of finance at Babson College. His research interests include the interaction of securities law and finance, securities market structure, investment management, and capital markets. From 2006–09 he was the director of the division of trading and markets at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he was responsible for matters relating to the regulation of stock and option exchanges, national securities associations, brokers, dealers, clearing agencies, transfer agents, and credit rating agencies. Sirri served as the SEC's chief economist from 1996–99, and was an assistant professor of finance at Harvard Business School from 1989–95. He has published in academic journals, practitioner journals, and books. He has also served on the boards of securities exchanges, mutual funds, industry associations, and foundations, and has consulted for securities firms, stock exchanges, mutual fund companies, issuers, and information vendors on a variety of regulatory and business matters. Sirri received a BS in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology, an MBA from the University of California–Irvine, and a PhD in finance from the University of California–Los Angeles.

Markus Stricker is the director of the Willis Economic Capital Forum and a professor in the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University's J. Mack Robinson College of Business. His specialties include quantitative risk management for insurance companies, risk transfer/reinsurance structuring and optimization, and risk management organization, processes, and governance. After he received his BA, MSc, and PhD from the ETH in Zurich, he taught mathematics and computer science at the University of Chicago. From 1994 to 2007 he held various risk management positions in the insurance industry. In 2007 he founded an actuarial consulting company. Its most prominent project was to build an open-source enterprise risk management platform.

John Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He formerly served as the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution. Taylor's fields of expertise are monetary policy, fiscal policy, and international economics. He served as senior economist on President Ford's and President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers, as a member of President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and as economic adviser to the Bob Dole and George W. Bush presidential campaigns. From 2001 to 2005, Taylor served as undersecretary of treasury for international affairs, where he was responsible for U.S. policies in currency markets, trade in financial services, foreign investment, international debt and development, and oversight of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His 2007 book Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World describes his years as head of the international division at Treasury. His most recent book, First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America's Prosperity, won the 2012 Hayek Prize. Taylor received a BA in economics from Princeton University and a PhD in economics from Stanford University.

Paula Tkac is a vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She leads the financial markets group in the research division and serves as a policy adviser. Tkac conducts research on various financial market topics, including investor decision making, the mutual fund industry, financial regulation, and the recent financial crisis and policy responses. Her research has won two William F. Sharpe Awards at the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. In addition to publishing in academic journals, Tkac frequently speaks to academic and practitioner groups and has appeared on C-SPAN and as an op-ed writer in the Wall Street Journal. Tkac was promoted in 2010 to assistant vice president with responsibility for the financial markets group. Before she joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in 2000, she was on the faculty of the finance department at the University of Notre Dame. Tkac earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of Chicago.

Robert Van Order is a professor of finance and Oliver T. Carr Professor of Real Estate at George Washington University. His areas of expertise include financial markets, housing finance, and housing policy and real estate. He has taught at Purdue University, the University of Southern California, Queen's University (Canada), American University, the University of California–Los Angeles, Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). Van Order was an economist at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), serving as director of the Housing Finance Analysis Division, and he was chief economist at Freddie Mac. He has been a consultant to United States Agency for International Development (USAID), HUD, the World Bank, and other corporations, agencies, and organizations, both public and private. A member of the American Economic Association and the American Real Estate & Economics Association, he sits on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals. His work on economics, housing, and real estate—both academic and general—has been widely published.

Larry Wall is the director of the Center for Financial Innovation and Stability (CenFIS) in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He joined the financial structure team of the Bank's research department in 1982 and was promoted to his present position in 2001. In addition to pursuing his research agenda, Wall gives policy advice and evaluates and provides counsel on staff research and professional activities. A certified public accountant, he is on the editorial boards of the Financial Review, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of Financial Stability, and Review of Financial Economics. He is also on the academic advisory panel for the International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI). He is a past president and chairman of the trustees of the Eastern Finance Association. Wall has also been an adjunct faculty member of Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. A native of Grand Forks, North Dakota, Wall earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of North Dakota and a doctorate degree in business from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.